Mark Girouard on Art and Culture in Elizabethan England

Your first book, C S Lewis’s Elizabethan Literature Excluding Drama.

People think of C S Lewis as a novelist really now, of course; he was an English don at Magdalen. I chose it really because it’s a work which I’ve found incredibly useful. It just is, in its way, a brilliant book, because it’s both scholarly and readable, comprehensive and perceptive. He’s interested in the intellectual background of the period. It covers all Elizabethan and early Jacobean literature, excluding drama of course, which is a big exclusion, but that would have needed another book. It’s quite critical – that’s a good thing – and lively, and he goes through it chronologically. It’s also very useful and illuminating: when he comes to an author there’s a footnote with a potted biography. He really gets one interested in the writers who interest him or who he values, and makes you want to read them – or not read them. I found that for instance, reading about Spenser, who I had found quite hard going.

What was it that spurred his passion for the age?

Really the intellectual moral background of the Elizabethan era, and the intricacy of it. I think he’s got a very strong moral sense, which comes across in his novels too. He’s quite interested in the moral backgrounds of writers of the period, and is good on Fox and the religious writers of the time, as well as the poets and writers of romances and so on.

Now, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England by Anthony Wells-Cole.

It doesn’t sound very exciting but it really is. It really was a seminal book this, because he was interested in the extent to which the work of artists, craftsmen and embroiderers in England relied on decorative ornamental prints from the Continent. His extraordinary achievement was to build up an enormous library of photographs of all those actual prints, as well as photographs of the English ornament, a lot of which are reproduced in colour in this book. And he had this amazing visual memory, so he could match them together and even when, you know, a little corner of a print had been taken out and made into a bit of fireplace or something, he could spot it.

Was he the first to notice these similarities?

People sort of knew it: a few correlations had been spotted, but what he really found out was that pretty well any Elizabethan ornament, whether on a dress, on a fireplace or a piece of furniture, in an engraving, in a book, derives from Continental sources, because they were the only sources available really.

Was there no English tradition worth building on?

There wasn’t so very much in Britain. There was this terrific surge of engravings on the Continent, which came flooding into England mostly from Antwerp, but to some extent from Italy and France too. There was a big market for engravings around St Paul’s, but also a lot of foreign craftsmen were coming over from the Continent, usually because of religious wars and so on. What I found so interesting was that you might have thought that this meant that Elizabethan art was completely derivative, but it wasn’t: because they used these sources in a wonderfully creative way – they would take out one element and enlarge it, or alter it, or they would collage together lots of different things so the end result was something basically different from what they’d been copying.